The Sketchbook Project draws the line, all the way from Melbourne to the world

By Matt Holden

3 April 2015 — 11:45pm

Jo Buckland can't remember what she drew in the 36-page sketchbook back in 2010. When a friend told the then 20-year-old Victorian College of the Arts student about a crowd-sourced art project based at the Brooklyn Art Library in New York, she sent away for one of the $US25 A5 sketchbooks on offer. When she returned it, filled with drawings, it was catalogued and added to the library's shelves, along with more than 32,000 others from around the world.

Buckland's sketches were the stuff of everyday life – a pill bottle, UHT milk capsules, a disposable toothbrush – with labels noting the date, the materials and the origin of each item. Some of them have now made it into a book on the project, The Sketchbook Project World Tour.

Sarah Catherine Firth's sketchbook.

Photo: The Sketchbook Project World Tour

Hers is one of 50 sketchbooks from Australia, including around a dozen from Melbourne, among the hundreds of sketchbooks featured.

Another was created by Elizabeth Banfield, a printmaker who uses linocuts to make artists books. Her sketchbook was a tactile object. Working with the theme The Museum of Forgetting, she made linocuts of leaves from her Dandenongs garden and stitched them into the book. "Then I cut through the holes insects had eaten in the original leaf – so you could see through to something that was on the other side."

Sarah Catherine Firth in her East Brunswick home/studio.

Photo: Simon O'Dwyer

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When the Australian sketchbooks were included in a show at VCA in 2013, Banfield visited and took her own book out, along with the book that sits beside it on the shelf, which is the library's usual practice.

"I looked at my own book because I hadn't seen it for a year or two, and then I got an email at home: 'Elizabeth B has looked at your sketchbook'. I also got one by another Melbourne printmaker, John Ryrie, quite randomly."

The crowd-sourced art project has attracted all kinds of sketchers – artists, printmakers, illustrators and graphic designers such as Bec Feiner.

Feiner heard about it from a friend and decided to order a sketchbook. Over 30 consecutive days, she documented the different routes she took from where she was living in Abbotsford to her workplace in Brunswick. Thirty lines wind through the pages, overlapping and tangling like a deconstructed London Underground map, one for each journey on different trams and on foot.

Elizabeth Banfield's sketchbook.

Photo: The Sketchbook Project World Tour

"The different colours are different routes. It's all secretly coded," she says. Not so coded are the buildings along the route: landmarks such as St Patrick's Cathedral and the old art deco change rooms at Princes Park on Royal Parade, rendered in careful line drawings from photos she took on the trips. It's an architectural tour of inner Melbourne, and because Feiner opted to pay the extra $US60 to have her sketchbook digitised, it's available to anyone in the world who cares to look.

Some sketchbookers are people who just draw for pleasure, such as Michelle Mun, a final-year dentistry student at the University of Melbourne and self-confessed "fan-art nerd".

Bec Feiner's sketchbook.

Photo: The Sketchbook Project World Tour

Mun's sketchbook, themed The Last Word Ever Spoken, contains illustrations of characters and scenes from books such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, The Little Prince and even a steampunk version of Pride and Prejudice.

While she usually works in Photoshop, the sketchbook drawings are done with black ballpoint in a romantic style that is reminiscent of Japanese teen manga – beautiful boys and girls in fantastic, evocative settings.

Michelle Mun's sketchbook.

Photo: The Sketchbook Project World Tour

Mun, who used to draw with a group of friends during lunchtimes at Methodist Ladies College, says she usually draws in response to a book or a movie. "When I started I drew a lot of fan art – characters from TV shows. And I was really into anime."

During a visit to the Brooklyn library, she took her sketchbook out. "I like to keep my art," she says. "So thinking of it all the way over there in Brooklyn – it was like, 'My baby, so far away'."

Jo Buckland's sketchbook.

Photo: The Sketchbook Project World Tour

Sarah Catherine Firth makes her living from various creative activities, among them creating short animated films for the United States Comedy Channel and graphic recording, a form of visual note-taking used to facilitate conferences and other group presentations.

"People like to try and figure out what I am," Firth says. "But I'm many things. The thing that pins it all together is drawing narrative and action."

Deb Taylor's sketchbook.

Photo: The Sketchbook Project World Tour

She shared a sketchbook with her sister, Adi, an award-winning comic artist. They drew comic strips about different weeks in their lives over three months, calling it Adi and Sarah Draw Life. It's a mix of panels about battling weevil plagues in the kitchen, holidays in Fiji and going back to university as a mature-age student.

"We do quite a lot of collaborative work together. We come from the kind of family where we play drawing games and create stuff together. It's part of our family culture," says Firth.

Cover of The Sketchbook Project

"I get very inspired by people – the world – stuff, and I want to capture it," she says. "It's usually real stories that I find bizarre or interesting. I want to pick them up and weave them into art, rather than creating fictional narratives. That's the common thread between what we did for the sketchbook project and my other work."

Brunswick artist and art teacher Deb Taylor picked up a blank sketchbook from the library in 2011. "I was in New York and I had an opportunity to go to the Art Library," she says. "Most of the sketchbooks were out on tour, so there was only a small selection."

She meant to use the sketchbook as a travel journal, "but that didn't happen".

"When I was in New York I came across a little collection of cards that had cutouts. They were all different colours, and depending on what card was underneath what other card, you would get different geometric patterns happening.

"When I got home I thought, OK, I'm going to use this idea of the cutouts and just have a play around with collage and drawing and make something that's a bit more interactive than some of the things that I'd seen, still lives or a narrative-based series of images." Taylor's sketchbook was made for flipping, with the cutouts offering glimpses of what's to come on the following pages.

"The beauty of this project is that it's actually not aimed at artists at all," says Taylor. "The purpose is to encourage people to make art and just do it within the limitations of an A5 notebook. And the inspiration is seeing the diversity of what people do."